A natural co-conspirator in the design of the built world is speculative fiction. Clarkesworld is hands down the classiest online speculative monthly out there (and their September edition just came out).

Enjoy!

Technology--or rather, particular implementations of it--are like enzymes, dropped into our protein pool of possibilities. They lower the activation energy of various tasks. Our rate of communication is greatly increased by our mobile phones; the energy required to clean our clothes is greatly reduced by washing machines.

Lowered activation energy isn't always a good thing. How much time is idly wasted with mobile devices? How much plastic is needlessly created and cast off into the environment? Without these enzymes, would our finite human resources be more satisfyingly spent? As with biological well-being, technological health is a layered process. The enzyme suppliers must be aware of the long-term effects of their product, though the final responsibility lies with the well-informed user.

The Turing Test is an enduring artifact of cybernetics, computer science, and popular imagination. Although it is far from universally accepted as proof of much of anything, I'd like to briefly poke another hole or two in its premises.

The original "game" proposed by Turing involved no computers--there was one man, and one woman. A third person (a tester) was able to communicate with them only by written notes, and was tasked with determining the participants' correct genders. The twist is this: the man was instructed to trick the tester into believing he was a woman, and the woman was instructed to behave naturally. Turing then adapted the idea by replacing one participant with a a computer, leaving the tester to determine which was human. If the tester failed to correctly determine which participant was the computer, then the computer could be considered intelligent.

I have three problems with this formulation:

1) It is based on deception. In the natural world, deception is practiced by both predators and prey. Successful deception by one means the suffering or death of the other. Likewise in the human, business, social, and ethical realms, we rarely hold deception to be a virtue worth building upon. If accepted at face value, this formulation devalues human intelligence by equivocating it with deception. As a human being, I would like to see intelligence defined in more human, and less algorithmic, terms. (Or in ruthless evolutionary terms: if computers do someday achieve intelligence, we got here first, and we should define the terms in our enduring favor.)

2) It is excessively reductive. Narrowing the channel through which intelligence must be communicated to one of such tiny bandwidth (not to mention a single channel, unlike the human experience of multiple channels and senses) intentionally privileges the computer. I might as well propose that a small box which emitted a human-sounding laugh in response to funny jokes (and no sound in response to bad ones) was intelligent--surely it requires human-like intelligence to understand when jokes are funny? Not at all.

3) It conflates the signifier with the signified. Clever strings of text do not inherently indicate intelligence. We accept text-based communication because it is a sufficient signifier of something more--another human--on the other end. We accept this signifier precisely because, historically, only a human can generate it. If computers can reliably generate that signifier then it will no longer signify what it always has. Rather than prove machine intelligence, a successful Turing test will only prove the insufficiency of the very medium it uses (devaluing it in the process).

I'm no Luddite; but we need a much-improved version of the Turing test for it to have any meaning. This will require improved definitions of what intelligence really is. We must make sure that those definitions serve the humanity they come from, rather than its by-product.

"[The Turing test] does not necessarily mean that the computer has become more human-like. The other possibility is that the human has become more computer-like." --Jaron Lanier

At what point does an informational tool become so overwrought that it becomes something entirely different from its base form?

A standard street sign has a known function and simple premises and affordances. It is intended to provide context within a given city. The example above, while providing some local context, is meant to set the reader within a global context. It is not "usable", but it does provide a function.

Overwrought software is nearly always frustrating. Are there cases where it begins to fill a different purpose altogether from what the designers intend? Can such products have repeat usefulness?

A few thoughts on Adam Greenfield's survey of the now-and-future landscape of ubiquitous computing. Concise and well-written, though not in-depth, I would add a few points to his assessment:

On Multiplicity: the more mundane aspects, such as multiple systems knowing which are being addressed, are certainly valid engineering problems. For the issue of multiple conflicting orders (or preferences) being simultaneously delivered to a single system, I also see cause for some playfulness. Who decides a room's temperature, lighting, or mood music? Depending on the participants and the forum, this could become a metagame of its own. The interaction between individuals' static preferences and the system's processing rules could lend itself to enough fun by itself: Gamers might yield control to the player with a high score; businessmen to recent sales...the list goes on. But add the ability to incorporate performance, realtime feedback, and 'dialog' between systems, and the possibilities for a bit of fun are endless.

On The Inescapability of One's Own Datatrail: Greenfield gives not even a passing mention to the ability to create multiple digital personas--just as most of us do now--which remain linked to each other only to the degree we explicitly allow. There's no reason why every ubiquitous system should recognize (and correlate) our behavior with every other system's recognition of us as an entity.

Two statements he makes that apply just as well to non-ubiquitous design:

"Everyday life presents designers of everyware with a particularly difficult case because so very much about it is tacit, unspoken, or defined with insufficient precision"

Social networking sites? PDAs? Maybe even personal finance software? The problem applies to these as well, to varyingly recognized degrees.

"How can we fully understand, let alone propose to regulate, a technology whose important consequences may only arise combinatorialy as a result of its specific placement in the world?" (emphasis added)

Ditto the above examples, and pretty much everything else in the world.

He also comments: "We will find that everyware is subtly normative, even prescriptive--and, again, this will be something that is engineered into it at a deep level." While there can be value in saying that certain specific technologies (and their implementations) are more or less normative than others, I would argue that for sweeping statements like this, that the more relevant truth is that humans are normative (and to a hopefully slightly lesser degree, prescriptive) beings.

If ubicomp allows us to monitor our blood glucose levels in realtime, then many people will monitor theirs obsessively--even moreso if they can compare it against friends, family, and coworkers. But this won't because of any presumption of the technology. The reason we don't so it right now is more likely because we can't rather than that we wouldn't want to. This line of logic leads to an entire new world of considerations, the 'tyranny of choice' and so on. But--in an ideal world--once designers have ethically designed the information architecture, access mechanisms and so forth to be morally unimpinging, their work is far from finished. Then begins the probably far more difficult job of weighing the implications of human nature, and redesigning with that in mind. But since this is not an ideal world, users will be exposed to poorly designed, ethically challenged implementations, and will have to deal, collectively and individually, with the results--just like we do today.

A chuckle: Tonight I was out at the local arcade (Gameworks Seattle) doing an initial survey for a small usability study. I made notes in a voice recorder rather than pen & paper, as it was more discreet. As I was walking out the frount door, preoccupied with thoughts of transcribing my notes, I (literally) ran into the quintessential Don Norman usability blunder: a nice big door with a nice big handle on which to grip and pull. The problem being that the door can't be pulled. Only pushed.

I tugged twice before laughing at myself and pushing out onto the street.

The Adaptive path blog has a good entry today on the retail dressing room experience. My reaction falls into two basic parts: "good point" and "how to improve".

Part one: So, so true. The bigger the retailer, the smaller the percentage of floor space needed to devote to dressing rooms, and yet the overall resource expenditure on them appears to match the floor space. Poor lighting is the number one problem, and too-small dressing rooms the second (the nicer stores will often have nice large rooms, big enough for two people to sit, change, and view clothes. Julia's point that a free stylist improves the experience is a great idea for a value-adding service.

Part two: I'll go a step further, not on services but on a 'passive' element of experience design via architecture. Ever notice how dressing rooms are almost intentionally hidden, and/or placed in the furthest back corner of a store (again, the larger the store the greater the sin here)? Current retail space design makes it clear that placement of dressing rooms is an afterthought; something to tack on after the 'real' work of designing the floor space. A savvy retailer could make the dressing room a central focus of the store and a positive social experience. Make the dressing room central to the store rather than tangential--literally central, as an island in the middle of the floor. You might even raise it a step or two to visually highlight its importance. Tap into those anthropological associations to altars and stages. Make the dressing room the place to be and be seen, rather than browsing racks on the floor.

Of course this model isn't appropriate for every retailer, but might work wonders in younger, hipper markets. Physical centrality and elevation have generally positive psychological qualities, and creating the unspoken vibe that the dressing room is where the real shopping is done would almost certainly boost sales. Sales, and customer satisfaction with the shopping experience.

Arrogant and unsubstantiated prediction:

The iPhone will never be more than another marginal alternative to 'mainstream' phones. The latest figures show global sales of somewhere under 1.5 million units. While the media is hyping those figures rather shamelessly, in a global market of more than 1 billion handsets per year, it doesn't even scratch the surface.

Beloved of designers and hipsters, Apple products have always been marginal. The iPod is the exception rather than the new rule. The reasons for this are multiple and complex--too muchso for this post--but overly rigid manufacturer control is part of it (tangentially, the primary reason that the US phone market is behind both Europe and Asia, though the carriers are to blame there). A certain exclusionary haute self-selection is another; the iPhone frankly is not a phone for the masses.

Single best parallel world marketing advice? Apple should spin off a sister company to deal only with telephone hardware, build it over time to compete directly with the big names (Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, et al.), and--most importantly--give it the freedom to diverge somewhat from Jobsian ideology. To think otherwise is arrogance: Apple has neither the cash reserves nor market clout of Microsoft moving into the game console market, but a separate company could indicate a seriousness and long-term credibility that Apple can't muster.

Would a more reasonable price point make a difference? Perhaps. Apple's pricing games certainly aren't winning hearts and minds. But the main thing? Most people don't want such slickness; it scares many of them. It's a nice piece of hardware and I wish them well with their demographic slice. Apple knows 'design', but it still doesn't understand the broader market.

What might their designers be able to do if they were restricted to 'normal' hardware, and an under-$100 retail price? That might be a very interesting product.

David Levy's dissertation/book, "Love and Sex with Robots," has gathered some media attention recently. The assertion that people will be loving, and (ahem) loving, robots before too long is apparently something of a social shocker, though it should come as no surprise. People are already having sex with life-like dolls, and people already have very strong emotional attachments to man-made objects: their cars, iPods, phones, and so on (and I would argue that, psychologically, this "love" is not so different from the human kind).

The more interesting (though less sensational) questions are social. The unity that comes from the bonding of two humans is a certain thing, though there are certainly many variations on the details. But the thing that is the relationship between human and robot will almost certainly be a qualitatively different thing. While it may (or may not) be a satisfying emotional equivalent, it will allow, provide, and mandate a new set of inputs and outputs, metaphorically and literally. Creative and business partnerships, in addition to personal relationships, will have a new frontier for development in combining the relative strengths of man and machine--as, of course, technology as done for centuries. But this technology revolution is likely to be more intensely social than anything we've seen thus far.

It is easy to dismissively conceive of robots as ambulatory PDAs, but that's a problem with our vision rather that the potential of the thing. Sex is easy to predict, almost banal. It may even be a motivating force behind the development of humanoid robots. But--as always--what will make the world different won't be what people are doing in their bedrooms, but rather what they can do outside of it.

Is it by design, or happy coincidence that federal income taxes (in the US) are due in mid-April...and that federal elections take place in early November? What would be the effect on national politics if taxes were due on November 1st?